Gary Sutton

And does it make sense to tank?

And the data says that it does.

But you would not otherwise have any opportunity or any chance unless you had a poor record to begin with.

You're right.

With the lottery, you're not guaranteed.

If you have the worst record...

Back in the day, you were guaranteed to have the very first pick, right?

With the lottery, you're not guaranteed to have the first pick, but you otherwise don't have any other chance.

It's better than nothing, right?

It's better than nothing.

Absolutely.

And even Mark Cuban was recently defending tanking.

Yeah, and saying that, well, it's really not that bad for the league.

You know, tanking has been, I don't know if it's a problem or it's just been an issue.

But it's been an issue or a problem, however you want to define it, for many, many years.

What suggests the NBA hasn't resolved it.

But yeah, there's, based on the data that I looked at and evaluated, there's an incredible incentive to tank if you want to build your roster through the draft.

You can go the free agency route.

There's other ways to build up your team.

But if the draft is the way you want to go, you need to get to the top of the draft, and the only way to do that is to have a losing record, a really, really bad one-loss record.